Keeping in touch

It's a (rather sad) fact of my life that I suck at keeping in touch. And this fact is more evident at get-togethers, where I generally receive a (well deserved) banter. Meeting many old buddies over the weekend brought this fact home and nostalgia took over. It was in this state of mind that I was travelling back from Bhimashankar (the trip itself deserves a separate post) on Sunday evening. Slightly sleepy, with no lights visible for miles, we are travelling on the zig-zag road, and suddenly it dawned upon me. I had failed to keep in touch with one more companion. So much so that, I was not even aware upto that point in time that I had lost touch. It's the night sky. It was dazzling, something I had long forgotten. Now let's admit it, we're all stargazers (or at least we have been, at one time or another). I was fortunate enough to spend my childhood in a small town, where city lights still had not obliterated the glory of night. A friend and me had even rigged a telescope (even welded its stand ourselves). Hours and hours spent just staring.. Another beautiful picture that came back was the view at Dive Agaar beach in our Konkan trip. Sea in front and the clear sky above, it had felt like heaven. But city skies are different, you might occasionally spot a star here and there, but the dazzle part (along with the awe it inspires) is missing.

Nostalgic whining notwithstanding, maybe there is a lesson for me. Keep in touch, and not just with your friends.
(and maybe I should buy that telescope of which I am dreaming for years. Let's see, let's see..).

Blogger's Dilemma..

Ninety percent of everything is crap.
~Sturgeon's law

I blog a lot (these days) and comment on other blogs a lot. But apply Sturgeon's law and there goes your Ninety percent !! (OK, I don't know about you, but it surely applies to me). And nobody likes crap. So the question is how to reduce it. One solution is to do these things less. That will reduce the total and hence its associated ninety percent crap. But to me, it looked like focusing on the wrong thing. I would rather increase the total and along with it, increase the ten percent noncrap (that's what I generally do). But I am really not sure that's the optimal thing to do. Nobody likes the increased ninety percent crap also. The best thing to do (it seems to me) is to put the whole thing in the least irritating place, like your own blog (coz people hate crap on their lawns even more). That translates to a 'Note to self': Try to write less crappy comments.

(I went ahead and googled for some advice. It returned this. So this is not that uncommon a problem, and there's still hope for me. Meanwhile, you can read all my comments as if prefixed with YACC (Yet Another Crappy Comment ;-)).

[And I agree in advance, the title (in addition to the the whole post) is crappy].

Evolution of a Blogger

Note: 'he' should be read as 'he/she', same for 'his' etc.

Evolution is not a belief system, it is a fact.

-read on BABlog

So it's only natural to suppose that Bloggers evolve too..

First Post phase:
Aka Bubbling Enthusiasm phase. After much procrastination, TPB (The Poor Blogger, faute de mieux) takes the first faltering step, i.e. writes his first post. Generally it does not have any content. Just the announcement, big plans etc etc. The link is forwarded to everybody in contacts. TPB thinks of this as a big event and eagerly awaits feedback.

Post First Post phase
Aka The First Blow phase. TPB discovers nearly nobody read his blog. Most, most people just don't care. That's a fact. TPB thinks that maybe the non-content post was the reason. So he goes on to write something that he thinks has content. Again nobody reads it.

I have better things to do phase
After facing the harsh realities of life, TPB thinks, maybe blogging is not for him. I mean (he thinks), what's the point of blogging if nobody reads it? I have better things to do, is what his conclusion is. And here, at this point, the evolution takes an unfortunate turn. Most bloggers leave, never to return. But there's still hope for some.

Another spike in the graph phase
The thing with the Internet is, once you write something, it's forever. So somebody stumbles upon TPB's stuff. And a passing mention is enough to revive TPB's enthusiasm. A series of posts follows.. And slowly, TPB starts to 'get it'. He discovers, there is a point in blogging, even if nobody reads it. It helps you organize your thoughts and provide a way to record them, which you can later enjoy and amuse yourself with. Now, either he figures this out himself, or more probably, somebody points him to Stevey's post. And he blogs happily ever after (and some posts are even read).

The evolution of course goes on, but I have no idea exactly how. I'll keep looking for it..

Sindabad the coder..

Sindabad the coder jab college se nikala,
mere yaar sunalo, sunalo..
Dhundh raha tha ek nayi company ka pata,
mere yaar sunalo, sunalo..

Sabne kaha tha IT me jana nahi,
mere yaar sunalo, sunalo..
IT me jake kuch bhi hai paana nahi,
mere yaar sunalo, sunalo..

Apni hi dhun me raha,
O-oh-ohh...
Sunata tha dil ka kaha,
O-oh-ohh...

Usaka project ghira toofano me,
mere yaar sunalo, sunalo..
Phir bhi na aayi kami usake manager ke armano me,
mere yaar sunalo, sunalo..

Woh...

Deewana aisa hi tha,
Code likhata hi gaya..

O-oh-ohh....

Complex sa project tha,
deadlines tight hi thi..
mere yaar sunalo, sunalo..
Coders jinko mushkil se samajhe,
aise bugs bhi the..
mere yaar sunalo, sunalo..

Deadline tak aa hi gaya..
Oh-oh..
Complete lekin kar hi diya..
Oh-oh..

Aisa the Sindabad the coder..


Rock On !!

P.S. I seem to be infatuated by the movie 'Rock On'. I just noticed that this is my third post that is one way or another, related to it.

Another edit to the blog !!

Can you tell the difference? Look at the right pane, under 'Blogs I (try to) follow'. Anything? OK, without further ado, let me tell you what it is. There is a new entry: 'Fermat's Last Theorem Blog'. Discovered it a couple of days ago. In all probability you have already heard about Fermat's Last Theorem, so I won't bore you with what it is. Point being, popular books like the excellent Fermat's Last Theorem (aka Fermat's Enigma) by Simon Singh (If you haven't read it, well, let me put it thus. I won't mind if you left this post right now to go read it), being intended for a general audience, provide only a high level overview of the actual proof. After reading that book, an attempt to understand the actual details is a natural progression. And the aforementioned blog has exactly the same purpose. The author, Larry Freeman, in a series of posts, tracks the historical development of the solution along with the actual proofs, from the point of view of an amateur. Smells good !! I have started reading it. Will keep you posted of how it goes.

Enjoy!!

A good movie is a also good reason to crib..

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
-Leonardo Da Vinci

I don't even remember when or where I read that quote, but it kept coming back to me while watching 'Welcome to Sajjanpur'. The movie very successfully captures the true picture of a contemporary village. The simple life, where superstitions still reign, the worries and hopes and fears and weaknesses and strengths are all very beautifully depicted. Every character feels real, you can almost name someone on which it might be based. The protagonist is a letter writer, who is eyes and ears for his mostly illiterate gaonwallahs. But what happens if he starts putting his own feelings in letters written for others? You'll have to watch the movie to find out.

The movie also brought the topic of real letters back to my mind. Call me prehistoric, but while a kid, I have written letters on a real postcard with a real pen, mostly to my grandparents. But now with mobile and sms in every home, letter writing is almost extinct (The movie even has in a scene our protagonist writing a sms chitthi). What we write is mostly emails (and some rants blog entries). And no need to tell, it's not the same. Letters somehow carried this ineffable charm (something to do, atleast in part, with writing on a paper). But it seems unlikely letters will gain ground again. I would rather not lose the old style, at least.

Keep smiling..

Exactly 26 years ago, on 19 September 1982, Scott Fahlman of CMU proposed the use of :-) and :-( as a way to convey emotions in running text. And suddenly email became rich. Then came the sms and it propelled the use of smileys to unforeseen heights. It was quite literally, One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind...

OK, enough rant!! If you are bored already, here is the wired entry, which also has the text of Scott's original message. More to the point, I can see that my pidgin app has 83 builtin smileys. So we have much more 'expressive freedom' (is that the right phrase?) these days. The thing is, sometimes I have to hunt through the entire list to find the 'right one'. So increased creative freedom translates to more time spent using it, or so it seems.

It's hard to imagine life without smileys these days. IMHO, the immense popularity of IMs and their kin derives at least in part from such apparently small things. But don't overuse them. People don't like it. But that won't stop me from pointing out my favorite..


And yes, Keep Smiling..

For Your Info

Just to let you know (if you don't already), stackoverflow has arrived. See what the creators Jeff and Joel are saying. And looks good, let me add..

Rock On !!

THEN:


Sameer: Sid, kya soch raha hai?
Sid: Dekh raha hu woh jahaj, jo jara der bad dikhai nahi dega...
Sameer: Hum sab dost hai Sid, zindagi bhar ke liye..
Sid: Of course hai, par kisaki zindagi kisako kaha le jati hai kya pata...


NOW:

Rock On..
Hai ye waqt ka ishara,
Rock On..
Har lamha pukara,
Rock On..
Yuhi dekhata hai kya tu,
Rock On..
Zindagi na milegi dobaraaaa....

~

Budding SciFi writers, pay attention...

Aliens sending messages by altering cepheids...
Sounds like a good SF plot to me..

Truly Random Post...

I'll be honest. I am not that big on music. Yeah, I listen a song here and there, but let's just say, I am a bit conservative. So generally, the latest and greatest in music is unknown to me. But that's a digression. More to the point, I was listening to "Socha hai" from the movie "Rock On", when I noted that the lyrics is kinda interesting. Here's how it goes..

Kabhi socha hai,
Aasama hai neela kyo,
Paani hai geela kyo,
Bahati kyo hai har nadi,
Barf girati hai kyo,
Tare kyo hai tutate,
Chand kyo do nahi,
Baadalo me bijali hai kyo,
Teen hai mausam kyo,
Socha nahi to socho abhi !!!

(not exact, but close)

The guy is posing some questions, and asking us to think. Very commendable. But AFAIK, we've good answers to all of these. They might not be easy, but they are there. My advice: Learn a little bit of science, if you really want to know.

But again, this quote might be in order ;-)

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
-Paul Dirac

Enjoy!!

What went wrong?

A little explanatory text might help in this particular case (seen during FC9 installation).

The Large Lepton Collider

Yeah, yeah, they switched on the Large Hadron Collider, and the world did not end, much to the disappointment of news channels who were hyping the whole thing. I don't know from where they get these ideas (not that I really want to know). But this might be a huge step forward for particle physics. While they are busy finding the Higgs Boson, enjoy this, this and this. And, anybody wants to see the large lepton collider..

(OK, I admit, other things are colliding too ;-)

Update: A few interesting numbers about LHC, here. So you will need a stack of DVDs 6.9 km, yes km, in height to hold the data generated by LHC. Maybe it's time to move on to Holographic storage ;-)

A quantum of solace

Ok, not related to the upcoming Bond flick, this quantum of solace is offered to fellow firefox lovers. So Google launched Chrome, along with a comic (it's quite readable), and it quickly became the rage. It uses this new VM thingy, V8. And looking at this, the speed difference is quite notable. More correctly, Chrome is insanely faster than the current crop of browsers. But where will that leave our beloved FF? So here I present to you this, a blog entry by Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich. (side note: he created javascript). So FF is also getting JIT in the form of Tracemonkey. And, and, it surpasses Chrome (though junta is debating this). One thing for sure, our beloved FF won't be left behind in the speed race (it would not have been anyway, as V8 also is Open Source). It would be quite interesting to watch.

Singh is King (of lucid explanations)

Recently I finished reading 'Big Bang' by Simon Singh. And it reinforced my opinion that Mr. Singh is one of the very best science writers we have. The book is amazing and amusing, just like Mr. Singh's other books. It traces the history of our attempts to understand the universe, beginning with the first mythological explanations through the emergence of the scientific method to the current theory of big bang. Now there is no dearth of books covering these topics. What makes 'Big Bang' special is its breadth and its logical flow.

To take one trivial example, many books will tell you about the emergence of Sun centered model in sixteenth century and how it was accepted over a period of time in the scientific mainstream. But why it was accepted? We know that Ptolemy's model, ugly as it was, was pretty accurate. Then why replace one model with another? Just for the aesthetic reason that the new model was simpler? That seemed unlikely. But Mr.Singh notes the crucial observation by Galileo of the phases of Venus that agreed only with the Sun centered hypothesis. And that was the crucial point where scientific thinking changed its course. To take another trivial example, while explaining special relativity, he explores its connection with Gallien relativity and also describes Einstein's thought experiment that led him to SR. Without these details, other popular accounts are quite hard to understand. To take another trivial example.., Ohk, I can go on and on, but I think you got the point.

It seems very hard to describe science in an easy to understand language without watering it down. No wonder, Mr. Singh has done it. I'll urge you to read it, even if you are not a fan of science books. And I'll urge Mr. Singh to keep writing..